PreviewLabs has always shown interest in virtual reality headsets, so when we got the chance to use the Oculus Rift in a research project to make child rehabilitation less demanding, we didn’t have to think twice to jump on board.

Game developers aren’t the only group of people in need of prototypes, we lend our services to academic researchers as well. Behind the jump we’re elaborating on three wildly fascinating science projects we’ve been working on in the past two years.

A good racing game flies or falls with the quality of the race tracks. Crafting those manually takes a lot of time. Time you don’t have when you’re rapidly developing a prototype, so we’ve taken a look at some tools to help us create fun race courses on a very short notice.

We tried to figure out if it’s possible to reconstruct a smartphone’s three-dimensional path using only accelerometer and gyroscope data. This could be used for instance to draw a race track in a room by walking around, while waving your phone as a brush to draw the track.

For PreviewLabs, keeping up with new technologies is of the utmost importance. Balancing the actual prototyping with doing research isn’t always easy, so we put our intern Peter on the job. Here are some topics he will look into so we can build better prototypes for a wider array of platforms.

Recently, we have been looking into technologies that allow integration of Flash animations in Unity3D prototypes and games. This seems to be very useful to create complex 2D animations in Flash, and play them in Unity.

What to do when you want to play a quick game of darts but there’s no dartboard in sight? You whip out your smartphone and use the digital dartboard prototype that’s brought to you by the combined power of PreviewLabs and augmented reality of course. Video inside!

We’re constantly on the lookout for new ways of quickly building environments to use in our prototypes. Ürban Pad prides itself on being one of the fastest ways to rapidly create a 3D city. Let’s find out if reality can match their claims.

PreviewLabs houses a team of proficient programmers. But wouldn’t we be able to prototype even faster when we had no use for code whatsoever? To answer that question, we took a look at GameSalad, a game engine for people with no prior programming knowledge.

In a previous post we talked about the severe limitations of Playmaker but since we’re quite charmed with the possibilities of the technology, we devised a workaround approach that enables us to profit from the best aspects of both Unity3D and Playmaker.

To state that there are a lot of plug-ins available for Unity3D would be quite the understatement. As is to be expected, not everything is useful to a prototyping company so we do a lot of research to look for the stuff that’s right up our alley. On today’s menu: Playmaker.

As a company specialized in rapid game prototyping, we decide on a per-project basis which technology is most suitable. To expand our possibilities, we will be researching a number of engines and middleware solutions, after which we’ll report the conclusion in separate blog posts.